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Do you remember the “smell test”? This was David Cameron’s furious edict to Tory MPs during the expenses scandal of 2009. Indeed, I can remember an incandescent Dave holding an instant press conference and telling us that Tory MPs would be “writing out cheques”.

“I don’t care if they were within the rules,” he said tersely, biting every word. “They were wrong.”

Yesterday at PMQs I found myself examining the prime minister’s nose, upon which, these days, perch a pair of reading spectacles. What has happened to his sense of smell? For there is no doubt that, in terms of